Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday July 06, 2009 @09:47AM
from the lemme-know-how-that-works-out-for-ya dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "CNN reports that Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen has raised $300 million to launch a new venture capital firm that aims to reinvent the way money is doled out in Silicon Valley while reflecting Andreessen's unwavering view that the Internet will soon take over all aspects of our lives and that online services won't merely supplement your TV viewing or newspaper reading, but will replace those activities altogether. Andreessen, on the board of Facebook and an angel investor in Twitter, says that technology moves so quickly that only the young can keep up with what the latest stuff can do. 'So the 24-year-old coming out of Stanford will have a view of technology that the 29-year-old — who was 24 just five years ago — would never think of,' say Andreessen. 'We love that kind of thing.' Andreessen thinks that when companies are acquired too quickly, innovation slows down, and he says that YouTube might have come up with a path to profitability faster if it wasn't a part of Google. 'It is hard for big ones to out-execute up-and-comers,' Andreessen says. 'Our secret plan is to watch what gets acquired and fund the next company. A good template is to fund companies doing whichever the next-generation product would have been.'"

He is spending other people's money in a risky environment with their full knowledge and consent. it is not called "venture" capital without a reason. They know they are investing in a high risk high potential business plan.

interesting theory you have there. So, all people who engage in any activities which have risk associated with them only do so because they are unaware of the risks, therefor all risk-based activities are scams and should be illegal?

It's called 'ROI'. If I have a portfolio of $100M, I might be willing to put up $10M in highly risky ventures under the assumption that some of them might succeed and return a significant sum that offsets the losses.

This is the nature of investing. I don't invest my 401K in risky stocks because I can't afford to loose it. But that doesn't mean someone who can afford to loose it, because they have already made enough to live on the rest of their lives, won't mind taking the risk for even more gain.

It's called 'ROI'. If I have a portfolio of $100M, I might be willing to put up $10M in highly risky ventures under the assumption that some of them might succeed and return a significant sum that offsets the losses.

ROI stands for return on investment. This is a method for deciding whether to make (or not) a particular investment.

It has nothing at all with how much you can afford to lose, nor with spreading the risk.

ROI can and should be applied to an entire investment portfolio to set goals. Once an investment strategy is determined, individual types of risks are gathered together and another expected ROI for each group can be further determined based on risk exposure.

So.. if I invest $1M ten times on a group of investments with a 75% of failure (0 ROI) but a 500% ROI if they succeed, my return on the 2-3 that succeed (i.e. 25% of 10) will be 10-15M, meaning at worst I'll probably break even if two succeed, but m

"So the 24-year-old coming out of Stanford will have a view of technology that the 29-year-old â" who was 24 just five years ago â" would never think of," say Andreessen. "We love that kind of thing."

Great. More age discrimination in software development hiring practices.

I'm obsolete at 36.

I know a lot of 20-25 year old people in universities. My 60+ year old dad keeps up with technology, especially internet technology, better than any of them. Andreeson's delusional thinking shouldn't be trusted.

My 60+ year old dad keeps up with technology, especially internet technology, better than any of them.

Keeping up is one thing, pioneering is another. The myth of silicon valley whiz-kids is distasteful. But When you look at Microsoft, Apple, google, facebook, Sun, netscape,... it is hard to dismiss entirely.

But When you look at Microsoft, Apple, google, facebook, Sun, netscape,... it is hard to dismiss entirely.

This really has a lot less to do with innovative ideas and pioneering and a lot more to do with risk. When you are 24, without a spouse, kids, and a mortgage to worry about, taking on the risk to build the "next big thing" is a lot easier.

However, taking the long shot on the next big thing while putting your children's ability to eat on the line is a lot harder, and some would say even irresponsible. For every Facebook and Twitter, there's a thousand things that failed in bankruptcy.

do you really want to argue based on such an obvious deliberate selection bias?

Fair enough, but the number of tech sectors is small enough to take a census rather than a survey. Microsoft is #1 in desktop software, Dell is #1 in desktop hardware, google is #1 in search, ebay (Pierre Omidyar) is #1 in auctions, facebook is #1 in social networking, Apple must be #1 in something:), all founded by youngsters. So the question is, can you come up with an equally impressive list of tech companies founded by

>> do you really want to argue based on such an obvious deliberate selection bias?

. Microsoft is #1 in desktop software, Dell is #1 in desktop hardware,. google is #1 in search,. ebay (Pierre Omidyar) is #1 in auctions,. facebook is #1 in social networking,. Apple must be #1 in something:),

Amazing. You respond to a challenge of selection bias with an even narrower bias.

Amazing. You respond to a challenge of selection bias with an even narrower bias.

You would be right if it were a narrow bias. What IT sectors are more important than the ones I listed, and which of those sectors are lead by companies founded by older people? Come on, if you are correct and I am ignoring lots of counter examples, this should be an easy one.

Interesting, but those are inventions, not companies (except for Altair engineering which is not in the league of google, apple, ebay, etc).

Now, I will readily agree that inventions are ultimately all-important. But we were talking about Marc Andreesen's venture capital investment firm. You can't invest in "The Internet," or "C". How many items in your list made millions for their investors, or even for the inventors themselves? It's a very small number, which is perhaps an indictment of intellectual

I'm sorry, but YOU originally started this thread by talking about pioneering. Your exact words were:

Keeping up is one thing, pioneering is another.

Starting a business and pioneering have absolutely nothing to do with other. People create businesses every day that don't pioneer a damned thing. People pioneer all the time working for pre-existing businesses, even their own.

I'm sorry if I can't keep up with your ever-shifting sands. Are you talking about pioneering or creating businesses? Are you talking about IT in general or just a few websites (wh

"So the 24-year-old coming out of Stanford will have a view of technology that the 29-year-old â" who was 24 just five years ago â" would never think of," say Andreessen. "We love that kind of thing."

Great. More age discrimination in software development hiring practices.

I'm obsolete at 36.

I know a lot of 20-25 year old people in universities. My 60+ year old dad keeps up with technology, especially internet technology, better than any of them. Andreeson's delusional thinking shouldn't be trusted.

"So the 24-year-old coming out of Stanford will have a view of technology that the 29-year-old â" who was 24 just five years ago â" would never think of," say Andreessen. "We love that kind of thing."

Great. More age discrimination in software development hiring practices.

I'm obsolete at 36.

Not really age discrimination. I think Adreessen's comment is incorrect, but it reflect his superficial analysis of a reality:

The 24-year-old coming out of school generally does not have a family to support or a big investment in where he lives, and is therefore more willing to take big risks.

The 29 or older crowd is more likely to have needs and commitments that would not survive the failure of a major venture or possibly even a major upheaval in lifestyle such as spending 16 hours per day at work for mont

So am I apparently with less than a month before I turn 34. But don't worry, because Marc Anderson is even more obselete than we are. This Wednesday (July 9th), he'll turn 38. That's positively ancient. By his own reasoning, he should be checking into a retirement community soon.

Yet, its Andreeson who decides which ideas are "good" by investing in them. So he doesnt want the creativity of the 20-something crowd, he wants them to work for peanuts, slave away at a product, put their lives on hold, and take a big bet that they will be the next Facebook while Andreeson and his partners sit back.

Granted, thats investment in a nutshell, but the ability to choose what to invest in isnt done by the 20 year olds, its done the 50+ crowd. The reason he's targeting 20 year olds is because the

And it doesn't matter. As the prototypical "obsolete" 29 year old from the example, I can tell you it doesn't matter whether the 24 year old is full of shit or not. Shit sells.

When I was applying to ivy league schools, literally every piece of advice I got was to lie out your ass. Lie about your achievements. Write your own recommendations. Just pull stuff out of thin air. Make it as flamboyant as possible, and as convincing as you can. As far as they know, you're a genius black inventor mathematician cellist who can write upside-down and backwards using your little toes. Books, articles, current and former students; they all said the same thing: Give admissions staffers the unbelievably entertaining bullshit they want to hear. Hell, you should even tell them that you have some plan to pay back the ridiculous loans they give you.

And judging by what I've witnessed over the last ten years, that was absolutely the correct advice. Yale, Harvard, the school doesn't even matter. Most of them didn't do well. Some didn't even graduate. But, one by one, a steady stream of the the best liars these institutions have to offer have stood up and lied over and over again to the rest of us and become filthy rich and wildly successful doing so. They have swindled us, stolen from us, violated our rights, led us into wars and destruction and profited greatly by it. All the while giving back to their alma maters in the process.

It doesn't matter that this group of people are investing millions of dollars into completely unproductive Web 2.0 bullshit with no viable revenue stream. It doesn't matter that the money they are frittering away is ultimately borrowed from foreigners, swindled from the elderlies' retirement funds, or doled out via government "stimulus".

It doesn't matter that they are sinking the US economy in the process, wasting an entire generation's productive efforts on shiny trinkets that will be unceremoniously duplicated by overseas competitors if by accident they ever attain any real value.

No, no. What matters is that they are productive, successful "entrepreneurs" who are "innovating". And if they can find an ambitious young 24-year-old with an idea to spy on his neighbor's porn surfing and advertise divorce lawyers to his wife, that'll be the next big thing. Because it'll be easy to patent and will give a 2% greater return than a business plan to manufacture automated fruit-pickers.

As a proud satanist investing in these innovators, I demand to be called a demon investor, not an "angel investor" or some similar pussy ass fairy. (And why aren't there any atheists among the VC any more?)

Well since nobody from Marc Andreessen's examples would have a clue what Logan's Run [wikipedia.org] is you might have at least given them a link [imdb.com]. Or did they already create the mind machine interface that would download the info directly to their brains and nobody told those of us over 30?

Now if they could just get the laser from that movie mounted to a shark's head.

Ah. The old "youth is everything, experience is irrelevant" approach. The movers of this new culture can facebrag about it as they pass their hand me ups to their decrepit, tweetless, senile elders (anyone over 25).

Interesting... how could I integrate this with the bridge I just bought to bring synergy about to all of our team members in a way to allow our company to realize the opportunities we perceive in web 2.0??

Interesting, I'm now late 30s and frequently run across 20-somethings who have little to no computer/Internet interest. Some personality types want to interact socially in person and others want to read paper.

Sure libraries are accommodating new media, but they aren't eliminating the old, which still gets used. Attorneys and doctors continue to need paper.

His perspective generally sounds like a good one, but doesn't seem to recognize an entire segment of our population--like nearly everyone at the BBQ I was at on the 4th.

A friend there was laughing when her sister called to ask where/when fireworks might be shown, despite them having a computer in the kids playroom and their kids being able to search it faster than she could call her!

The "only the young can be this innovative" line is an old one. The basic premise is that the reason why the 50 year olds with all the money don't understand the idea is because they're old, not because the idea is full of shit. It works because a lot of 50 year olds are afraid they're old and out of touch and will pretend the idea is good to seem young, sort of an emperors new clothes type of thing if you see what I mean.

This guy doesn't really believe his own bullshit, he just wants to make a lot of money out of pretending he does.

I didn't say all these ideas are full of shit, some are demonstrably not, and certainly there are plenty of stupid venture capitalists(see the.COM fiasco for evidence).

However, "only a 24 year old could understand this" isn't about selling good ideas to 50 year olds. Selling good ideas is easy because if they're really demonstrably good ideas you can show the 50 year olds how it will make money. If it doesn't make money then it's not a good idea, or at least it's not a good idea to invest in if you want re

This guy has a track record of following behind and just missing. The plan sounds like a mission statement rather than an actual plan, and the preconception that age has anything to do with innovation at all is crap thinking.

This sort of thinking is exactly why Netscape managed to fail spectacularly. Taking a dumb idea and running with it.
"Hey, let's take a few years and write a brand new product while we let development on our flagship product remain stagnant... It's only Microsoft that's chasing us down, so what could happen?"

Whatever happened to taking pride in making something great, and then spending a large portion of your life refining that thing or your ability to make it? Sometimes I wish I was a furniture maker instead of a software developer. New and innovative products are great, but what's the end goal? More new and innovative products? Sure, fine, great. I'm sure it's all just a big race to the bank for most people, like Andreessen, but for some who just need enough money to live comfortably, it's about striving for

There's so much wrong with this young, arrogant fool touting his ageism. Young people are not necessarily the crux of innovation.

Working in the creative industries, it's easy to see that the arrogance and folly of youth might get you noticed and the attention of other young people -- but most great art is done by people with decades of experience. Compare the early work of any artist to their later work and you will see that in most cases.

The trouble with technology and the internet in particular -- is that it is seen as a "young person's medium". It's often just a get rich quick scheme for investors. Many of the new internet ideas have made a great deal of money for a small number of people, but they all have limited shelf life, and their users grow up and mature and seek other things. Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace, are dwindling. Geocities, Altavista, Netscape, and many, many more are all but gone. Twitter will follow them shortly.

The problem is, these innovations are shallow and mostly only appeal to young people. Nobody under 25 is looking at sustainable, reliable, usable services for the over 30s. It's all just fad and fashion and plugging a gap to get rich quick. This is not really innovation.

I've seen very little innovation on the internet in the past 10 years. Google came, changed search, and stayed the same. Social networking and blogs are easier to use and more marketed, but not significantly different from many BBS and similar at the beginning of the web. Google Earth is innovative, bittorrent is innovative, and perhaps there are a few other things. But on the whole the legacy of developers and entrepreneurs in their 20s is just using the same old tech with lots of hype and buzzwords.

DaVinci, Edison, Tesla, and many, many, many, many more, kept truly innovating late into life. As their experience grew, they made better inventions.

Sorry, but this precocious, silly little boy needs slapped. He does not know as much as he thinks he knows. Maybe he will get rich. But it is not likely he will really do anything of any importance to future generations for many years to come.

Personally I'd like to know how to contact someone like this in regards to presenting an idea. Business plans are not somethign that is easily done, and I've always been better at a verbal pitch, but gettign the opportunity to talk or coorespond via email with someone that has the power to make a decision is neearly impossible. I've emailed every address on the planet that I could find for News Corp, initially wanting to pitch the idea to them. But you don't even get a reponse back of any kind. wtf - I mean

One of the big problems with Internet businesses is that there's a huge disconnect between what will attract users and what will make money. In 1999, there were companies saying that growth was about "eyeballs", and only "old economy" people worried about revenue. That didn't work out too well. For a recap of this, see Downside's Deathwatch [downside.com], which I did back then. (Where it says "Chart is not available for this symbol", it means they're long gone.)
So we've heard that particular line of bullshit before.

Similar claims have been heard for social networks, few of which have paid back their original investment. Myspace, in their best year, (2007) made only $10 million. [techdirt.com]
News Corp paid $580 million for Myspace. They'll never see that back. Investors in other has-been social networks (AOL, GeoCities, Orkut, Tribe, Friendster, Classmates, Nerve, etc.) did even worse.

Andreessen has a point that YouTube would have had to find a way to become profitable by now if they weren't part of Google. Of course they would. No VC would continue to fund a money drain like YouTube. YouTube couldn't even survive as a zombie; they cost too much to run. ("zombie": VC term for companies which can't come close to paying their startup investment, but generate just enough revenue to cover their operating costs. They're the living dead of startups.)

Google still gets something like 97% of their revenue from AdWords. Everything else they've done loses money. Google had one great revenue product - AdWords. They've been frantically trying to find another, without success. Google has a great capability for deploying money-losing free services, but none of them, from Gmail to book-scanning, are generating serious revenue.

There are lots of things that are interesting to do technically, and even useful and popular, but don't make money. I've done a few myself. Andreessen probably has some good ideas like that, and I'm sure he can find more. But if he's going to run money as a VC, he'll have to do better.

Better than the average VC, in fact.
There are currently too many venture capitalists. VCs as a group lose money, and have been losing money since 2003 or so. Venture capital as a business used to be highly profitable, but it no longer is. Too much dumb money came in during the first dot-com boom, and the VC business overexpanded. Silicon Valley venture capital used to be about funding a few engineers in a lab to do something great. Those startups often failed, but didn't cost more than a few million when they did. If one in 10 did something good, that was a win. During the dot-com boom, VCs started funding companies into the deployment and operating phase, which is when it starts to really cost. That's a way to lose hundreds of millions a pop.

So we'll see how Andreessen does. Remember, though, that it's not a win until long-term profitability is achieved and the original investment paid back.

The advantage that young people have is two-fold; That of Time, and Easy Cross-Cultural Networking.

Back when you were a kid, you didn't have to work. (School work, even when hard, is minimal.) Kids don't have kids, they don't have to worry about car or house payments. They don't have to go grocery shopping. They have all their free time to think about and explore the new trends.

Second, they have the biggest water-cooler to chat around. All day. --After you grow up and enter the work force, you are suddenly segregated into one social category or another and with that, you lose perspective. When you are a kid in school, however, you are rubbing shoulders with everybody; kids who will grow up to become doctors and nuclear scientists and politicos and hair-stylists and crack-heads. You see it all and you have the time to process it. You live right there in the big picture. You just don't have the brains to realize the power of that scenario.

See, on the down side, when you are a kid, you have cognitive blinders on which are so big that when you reach your thirties, you are stunned at the fact that you managed to survive for all the stupid things you did and blind-spots you functioned within. Kids are functionally retarded. --And I say that in the nicest way, because it's a process of growing up and we all go through it. Or at least this has been my own experience, and when I ask others, they nod and sigh deeply. Perhaps you are different, but I doubt it. Brains don't stop growing until you turn 18 or 19 after all, and your internal knowledge processing networks don't really crystallize into a rich enough understanding of reality to be terribly useful for another ten years at least. There's nothing wrong with this. It's called, "Growing up".

So. . . The trick is to make sure that when you reach your thirties you work to put yourself into a position where you have tons of free time and where you can connect with every social class you can reach. If you can do that. . , well then, now you're getting somewhere.

This is the same dirtbag who helped SCO craft their litigation strategy against IBM and Linux. Claiming that he was somehow instrumental in many of the software channels we use today. I never did figure what channels he was talking about, but apparently he's not getting mega rich off them if he's out begging for VC money.

One of the companies that Andreessen/Horowitz are funding is virtualization/cloud computing startup webappvm [datacenterknowledge.com], which recently demonstrated its technology at a Sun Microsystems event.

It's one thing to have an idea, and another entirely to monetize it and another thing entirely again to run a company that does it profitably. Yes, there are a few young people out there who can do all those things, but mostly they don't have the maturity or experience to do the critical latter two of those three tasks. They wind up blowing all the money on phat office furnishings and pool tables and parties so they can have hip, creative environments to inspire their genius, and only when the bank accoun

"Our secret plan is to watch what gets acquired and fund the next company.".Anyone who is following is, by definition, behind..By the time any company grows and gets acquired, the ship has not only left the dock, it has arrived at its next port of call..Even trying to "fund companies doing whichever the next-generation product would have been." is a hopelessly backwards-looking strategy. I've always had the impression that Andreessen is stu

So the 24-year-old coming out of Stanford will have a view of technology that the 29-year-old â" who was 24 just five years ago â" would never think of

No, shithead, that has nothing to do with age. Two months ago I was 22 and I didn't have a clue about Twitter cause I didn't see what the big deal was about. Now I'm 23 and I had to get into that stuff for marketing/PR and I know more about it.

The point is : it's not about age but about how updated you keep yourself. And thinking that a 24-year ol